Processing fees vs platform fees on a donation

Between the amount a donor gives and the amount that ultimately reaches you, two different fees apply. They're often lumped together as "fees," but they come from different places and behave differently. Here's the anatomy of a single donation.

The two fees

The Pledgix platform fee is Pledgix's charge for the platform, and it depends on your campaign's model:

• Pledgix Go campaigns pay a 0% platform fee. Instead, donors are invited to add an optional tip to Pledgix on top of their gift (more on that below).
• Pledgix One campaigns pay the current Pledgix One rate — shown in your dashboard and on the pricing page — as a percentage of each donation. Campaigns opened under an earlier rate keep their original rate, and a custom rate agreed for your campaign always overrides the default.
• Campaigns that process on their own gateway credentials (bring-your-own-key) pay no platform fee — Pledgix never touches those funds.

The payment processing fee is charged by the payment processor that actually moves the money (the company handling the card networks). Pledgix doesn't set this fee and doesn't receive it — it varies by processor and by payment method (a card payment, a digital wallet, and a bank-based method can each carry different processing costs).

A worked example

A donor gives $100:

• On a paid-plan campaign, the donor's card is charged exactly $100 — fees come out of proceeds, never added on top of the gift.
• On a Pledgix Go campaign, the donor may choose to add an optional tip to Pledgix, so the charge can be a little more than $100 — but the tip is Pledgix's, not the campaign's: it never counts toward your total, your teams, or your payout, and it never appears on the donor's tax receipt.
• Either way, your campaign total increases by $100 — dashboards and progress bars always show the gross gift, which is also what your donor's receipt reflects.
• From the proceeds, your campaign's platform fee (if any) and the processor's fee are deducted. What reaches you is the net: gross minus platform fee minus processing fee.

Where each fee shows up (and where it doesn't)

The donation row in your Donations tab shows the gross gift — what the donor gave — because that's what your fundraising reports, receipts, and public feed are about. Behind the scenes, the exact fee breakdown (gross − platform fee − processing fee = net) is stamped on each completed donation, and it rolls up where the money actually settles:

• Pledgix One campaigns — each payout in your Payouts & Transactions tab itemizes the gross amount, the platform fee, any reserve held, and the net amount sent to you. See Reading your payout breakdown.
• Campaigns on your own payment gateway — processing fees appear in your gateway's own reporting, and your gateway statements are the place to reconcile net amounts. On bring-your-own-key setups there's no platform fee to itemize at all.

Tip: When budgeting, plan on your net being your gross minus your platform fee rate minus roughly the typical card-processing cost. Your campaign's exact platform rate is shown in your dashboard; if you need it confirmed, ask via Help & Support.

Which donations carry fees

• Online donations (card, digital wallets, phone donations) — the fees above apply, since a processor moved the money.
• Manual and offline donations you record yourself (cash, checks, transfers you received directly) — no processing happens through Pledgix, so no processing fee is taken on them.
• Failed and declined attempts charged nobody, so they carry no fees of any kind.

Fees and refunds

When a donation is refunded, the donor gets their full amount back — the dashboard refund action moves the money itself for Stripe donations, while on other rails the actual refund is issued at your payment gateway and Pledgix syncs the record automatically. Processors have their own policies on whether their processing fee is returned. This is one more reason to prevent avoidable refunds — see Refunds — what happens when you refund a donation.

The one-sentence summary

Donors always pay what they chose (their gift, plus any tip they added on a Go campaign); your dashboards count the full gift; and the two fees — Pledgix's platform percentage, if your plan has one, and the processor's charge — come out of proceeds on the way to your bank, fully itemized where your money settles.

For how the platform fee relates to your Pledgix service invoices (spoiler: it never appears on one), see Platform fees explained.